Modern Love
Modern Love - meaning Summary
Mockery of Fashionable Love
Keats satirizes fashionable, theatrical love as childish affectation rather than genuine passion. He portrays lovers who play dress-up, mistaking costume and mannered sentiment for true feeling, and mocks the tendency to equate ordinary flirtation with historic, intense passions like Antony and Cleopatra. The speaker urges a return to authenticity, challenging the audience to prove their love’s substance rather than its fashionable appearance.
Read Complete AnalysesAnd what is love? It is a doll dress’d up For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle; A thing of soft misnomers, so divine That silly youth doth think to make itself Divine by loving, and so goes on Yawning and doting a whole summer long, Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara, And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots; Then Cleopatra lives at number seven, And Antony resides in Brunswick Square. Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world, If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts, It is no reason why such agonies Should be more common than the growth of weeds. Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.
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